Letters to the Editor

Tools

Great article ("Hotties," February 8th issue), but you missed two of the hottest of the Memphis hotties -- and they're married to each other!

Sarah Little, née Sarah Gross, is one of the best looking and brightest minds in town. She is a marketing exec for a leading-edge medical technology firm. Not too long ago, she married Brandon Little, a really great guy and "stud muffin" (my wife's words, not mine), who happens to design sophisticated, high-quality men's jewelry. He was the only American accepted into a very prestigious international fine-crafts design training program in Italy. (We're talking Cartier, Mont Blanc, Piaget, etc.)

Together they make a very hot couple who represent Memphis quite well. They're my niece and nephew, and it's great to have them in the family.

James Owen

Memphis

Snickers Ad

It's surely the troglodyte in me, but when I first saw the Super Bowl Snickers ad (Viewpoint, February 8th issue), my thought was: What a couple of morons! If I stereotyped at all, I felt like it was the grease-monkey, toothless mechanics of the world who need to be shaken.

My take on the ad's message was that there are morons out there who might act so barbaric when found uncomfortably close to another man that, yikes, romance might blossom.

Remember the Seinfeld episode when George (a moron if TV has ever presented one) was so concerned ("I think it moved") when a man gave him a massage at the spa? Same kind of laugh.

If any group should be raising a stink over this ad, I'm convinced it's the auto mechanics of the world. Gay or straight, they're surely brighter than the characters Snickers gave us on Super Sunday.

Frank Murtaugh

Memphis

President George

George Bush and all his loyal sycophants should be frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs. They have perpetrated the biggest hoax in the history of the United States: the war in Iraq.

The die-hard Bush supporters have supported his kick-the-can-down-the-road strategy for six years. They refuse to see the danger of his policies and castigate anyone who disagrees with them and call them terrorist-supporting appeasers, traitors, and enemies of America. These Bush loyalists are the true enemies of America. We're not the ones who want to tap your phones, read your mail, kidnap you and put you in a foreign prison, torture you, send you multiple times to a war zone, take away the habeas corpus laws guaranteed by the Constitution, sell you cherry-picked intelligence, make war with people not responsible for 9/11, enrich friends and pass out patronage jobs at the expense of hiring people with competence, bankrupt the country by running up huge deficits, and engage in a campaign of disinformation and government secrecy unheard of.

These neo-con nitwits and bottom-feeders claim the moral high ground but have been wrong on every issue. When the democracy they love to tout is installed in the Middle East, then, more likely than not, the terrorists will get voted into office. How is that a success?

How many cemeteries and VA hospitals do these guys have to fill to satisfy their supporters? Molly Ivins, the late great Texas columnist, wrote about Bush's political connections and strategy from the outset of his political life. She knew the spin and deceptions used to gain the public's trust, the sweetheart deals, the manipulations, the lies. They're all in her book Shrub.

Joe M. Spitzer

Memphis

Global Warming

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with hundreds of scientists from 113 countries, determined conclusively that man-made greenhouse gases are responsible for global warming. They predicted devastating droughts and hurricanes and extensive flooding of coastal areas, displacing millions.

A report released by the United Nations in November blamed animal agriculture for 18 percent of these emissions -- more than automobiles. Carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas, is emitted by burning forests to create animal pastures and by combustion of fossil fuels to operate farm machinery, trucks, refrigeration equipment, factory farms, and slaughterhouses. The much more damaging methane and nitrous oxide are released from the digestive tracts of cattle and from animal-waste cesspools. We don't have to wait for Earth Day to help save our planet. We can start with the next trip to the supermarket.